Wolmer Forest—Charm of contrast and novelty in scenery—Aspect of Wolmer—Heath and pine—Colour of water and soil—An old woman's recollections—Story of the "Selborne mob"—Past and present times compared—Hollywater Clump—Age of trees—Bird life in the forest—Teal in their breeding haunts—Boys in the forest—Story of the horn-blower.  
 
 
The first part of the story of that Selborne mound in a strange place was heard at Wolmer Forest, over five years ago, during my first prolonged visit to that spot. I have often been there since, and have stayed many days, but a first impression of a place, as of a face, is always the best, the brightest, the truest, and I wish to describe Wolmer as I saw it then.
 
It struck me on that visit that the pleasure we have in visible nature depends in a measure on contrast and novelty. Never is moist verdure so refreshing and delightful to the eye as when we come to it from brown heaths and grey barren downs and uplands. So, too, the greenness of the green earth sharpens our pleasure in all stony and waste places; trim flower gardens show us the beauty of thorns and briars, and make us in love with desolation. As in light and shade, wet and dry, tempest and calm, so the peculiar attractions of each scene and aspect of nature are best "illustrated by their contraries."
 
I had, accordingly, the best preparation for a visit {204} to Wolmer by a few days' ramble in Alice Holt Forest, with its endless oaks, and in the luxuriant meadows and cool shady woods at Waverley Abbey. It was a great change to Wolmer Forest. Although its soil is a "hungry, bare sand," it has long been transformed from the naked heath of Gilbert White's time to a vast unbroken plantation. Looked upon from some eminence it has a rough, dark aspect. There are no smooth summits and open pleasant places; all is covered by the shaggy mantle of the pines. But it is nowhere gloomy, as pine woods are apt to be: the trees are not big enough, on account of that hungry sand in which they are rooted, or because they are not yet very old. The pines not being too high and shady to keep the sun and air out, the old aboriginal vegetation has not been killed: in most places the ling forms a thick undergrowth, and looks green, while outside of the forest, in the full glare of the sun, it has a harsh, dry, dead appearance.
 
On account of this abundance of ling a strange and lovely appearance is produced in some favourable years, when the flowers are in great profusion and all the plants blossom at one time. That most beautiful sight of the early spring, when the bloom of the wild hyacinth forms a sheet of azure colour under the woodland trees, is here repeated in July, but with a difference of hue both in the trees above and in the bloom beneath.
 
Wolmer Forest
In May, Wolmer is comparatively flowerless, and there is no bright colour, except that of the earth itself in some naked spot. The water of the sluggish {205} boggy streamlets in the forest, tributaries of the well-named Dead Water, takes a deep red or orange hue from the colour of the soil. The sand abounds with ironstone, which in the mass is deep rust-red- and purple-coloured. When crushed and pulverised by traffic and weather on the roads, it turns to a vivid chrome yellow. In the hot noonday sun the straight road that runs through the forest appeared like a yellow band or ribbon. That was a curious and novel picture, which I often had before me during the excessively dry and windy weather in May—the vast whity-blue, hot sky, without speck or stain of cloud above, and the dark forest covering the earth, cut through by that yellow zone, extending straight away until it was lost in the hazy distance. Even stranger was the appearance when the wind blew strongest and raised clouds of dust from the road, which flew like fiery yellow vapours athwart the black pines.
 
The "Selborne mob"
In a small house by the roadside in the middle of the forest I found a temporary home. My aged landlady proved a great talker, and treated me to a good deal of Hampshire dialect. Her mind was well stored with ancient memories. At first I let her ramble on without paying too much attention; but at length, while speaking of the many little ups and downs of her not uneventful life, she asked me if I knew Selborne, and then informed me that she was a native of that village, and that her family had lived there for generations. Her mother had reached the age of eighty-six years; she had married {206} her third husband when over seventy. By her first she had had two and by her second thirteen children, and my informant, who is now aged seventy-six, was the last born. This wonderful mother of hers, who had survived three husbands, and whose memory went back several years into the eighteenth century, had remembered the Rev. Gilbert White very well: she was aged about twelve when he died. It was wonderful, she said, how many interesting things she used to tell about him; for Gilbert White, whose name was known to the great world outside of his parish, was often in her mind when she recalled her early years. Unfortunately, these interesting things had now all slipped out of my landlady's memory. Whenever I brought her to the point she would stand with eyes cast down, the fingers of her right hand on her forehead, trying—trying to recall something to tell me: a simple creature, who was without imagination, and could invent nothing. Then little by little she would drift off into something else—to recollections of people and events not so remote in time, scenes she had witnessed herself, and which had made a deeper impression on her mind. One was how her father, her mother's second husband, had acted as horn-blower to the "Selborne mob," when the poor villagers were starving; and how, blowing on his horn, he had assembled his fellow-revolutionists, and led them to an attack on the poorhouse, where they broke down the doors and made a bonfire of the furniture; then on to the neighbouring village of Headley to get recruits for their {207} little army. Then the soldiery arrived on the scene, and took them prisoners and sent them to Winchester, where they were tried by some little unremembered Judge Jeffreys, who sentenced many or most of them to transportation; but not the horn-blower, who had escaped, and was in hiding among the beeches of the famous Selborne Hanger. Only at midnight he would steal down into the village to get a bite of food and hear the news from his vigorous and vigilant wife. At length, during one of these midnight descents, he was seen, and captured, and sent to Winchester. But by this time the authorities had grown sick—possibly ashamed—of dealing so harshly with a few poor peasants, whose sufferings had made them mad, and the horn-blower was pardoned, and died in bed at home when his time came.
 
I did not cease questioning the poor woman, because she would not admit that all she had heard about Gilbert White was gone past recall. Often and often had she thought of what her mother had told her. Up to within two or three years ago she remembered it all so well. What was it now? Once more, standing dejected in the middle of the room, she would cudgel her old brains. So much had happened since she was a girl. She had been brought up to farm-work. Here would follow the names of various farms in the parishes of Selborne, Newton Valence, and Oakhanger, where she had worked, mostly in the fields; and of the farmers, long dead and gone most of them, who had employed her. All her life she had worked {208} hard, struggling to live. When people complained of hard times now, of the little that was paid them for their work, she and her husband remembered what it was thirty and forty and fifty years ago, and they wondered what people really wanted. Cheap food, cheap clothing, cheap education for the children—everything was cheap now, and the pay more. And she had had so many children to bring up—ten; and seven of them were married, and were now having so many children of their own that she could hardly keep count of them.
 
It was idle to listen; and at last, in desperation, I would jump up and rush out, for the wind was calling in the pines, and the birds were calling, and what they had to tell was just then of more interest than any human story.
 
Not far from my cottage there was a hill, from the summit of which the whole area of the forest was visible, and the country all round for many leagues beyond it. I did not like this hill, and refused to pay it a second visit. The extent of country it revealed made the forest appear too small; it spoilt the illusion of a practically endless wilderness, where I could stroll about all day and see no cultivated spot, and no house, and perhaps no human form. It was, moreover, positively disagreeable to be stared at across the ocean of pines by a big, brand-new, red-brick mansion, standing conspicuous, unashamed, affronting nature, on some wide heath or lonely hillside.
 
Hollywater Clump
A second hill, not far from the first, was preferable {209} when I wished for a wide horizon, or to drink the wind and the music of the wind. Round and dome-like, it stood alone; and although not so high as its neighbour, it was more conspicuous, and seen from a distance appeared to be vastly higher. The reason of this was that it was crowned with a grove of Scotch firs with boles that rose straight and smooth and mast-like to a height of about eighty feet; thus, seen from afar, the hill looked about a hundred feet higher than it actually was, the tree-tops themselves forming a thick, round dome, conspicuous above the surrounding forest, and Wolmer's most prominent feature. I have often said of Hampshire—very many persons have said the same—that it lacks one thing—sublimity, or, let us say, grandeur. I have been over all its high, open down country, and upon all its highest hills, which, although rising to a thousand feet above the sea at one point, yet do not impress one so much as the South Downs; and I have been in all its forest lands, which have wildness and a thousand beauties, and one asks for nothing better. But the Hollywater Clump in Wolmer Forest as soon as I come in sight of it wakes in me another sense and feeling; and I have found in conversation with others on this subject that they are affected in the same way. I doubt if anyone can fail to experience such a feeling when looking on that great hill-top grove, a stupendous pillared temple, with its dome-like black roof against the sky, standing high above and dominating the sombre pine and heath country for miles around.
 
{210}
Bird life in the forest
Gilbert White described Wolmer as a naked heath with very few trees growing on it. The Hollywater Clump must, one cannot but think, have been planted before or during his time. One old native of Wolmer, whose memory over five years ago went back about sixty years, assured me that the trees looked just as big when he was a little boy as they do now. Undoubtedly they are very old, and many, we see, are decaying, and some are dead, and for many years past they have been dying and falling.
 
The green woodpecker had discovered the unsoundness of many of them; in some of the trunks, in their higher part, the birds had made several holes. These were in line, one above the other, like stops in a flute. Most of these far-up houses or flats were tenanted by starlings. This was only too apparent for the starling, although neat and glossy in his dress is an untidy tenant, and smears the trunk beneath the entrance to his nest with numberless droppings. You might fancy that he had set himself to whitewash his tenement, and had carelessly capsized his little bucket of lime on the threshold.
 
It was pleasant in the late afternoon to sit at the feet of these stately red columns—this brave company of trees, that are warred against by all the winds of heaven—and look upon the black legions of the forest covering the earth beneath them for miles. High up in the swaying, singing tops a kind of musical talk was audible—the starlings' medley of clinking, chattering, wood-sawing, knife-grinding, whistling, and bell-like sounds. Higher still, above {211} the tree-tops, the jackdaws were at their aerial gambols, calling to one another, exulting in the wind. They were not breeding there, but were attracted to the spot by the height of the hill, with its crown of soaring trees. Some strong-flying birds—buzzards, kites, vultures, gulls, and many others—love to take their exercise far from earth, making a playground of the vast void heaven. The wind-loving jackdaw, even in his freest, gladdest moments, never wholly breaks away from t............